Driving Subscriber Growth with a Focus on the Subscriber
AMA with Brian Morrissey, Founder, The Rebooting; Former President, EIC Digiday Media
As you and your team continue to accelerate the subscription-based digital transformation, we want to focus on discussing proven and adaptable acquisition and onboarding strategies that not only drive growth, but ultimately lead to a better full-journey subscriber experience and an increased customer lifetime value. Our goal was to deliver actionable insights and provide connections for your continued success.
Brian Morrissey
“I think it's an important tool because you need to understand and have empathy for your audience needs. I'm a fan of the jobs to be done concept. What's the job the audience is relying on you to do? Starting from there is critical.”
Full Transcript
*Questions submitted by community members
Please join me in welcoming Brian Morrissey, Founder of The Rebooting, who will be answering your submitted questions on the topic of Driving Subscriber Growth with a focus on the Subscriber. I am thrilled that we can pick his brain. Having known Brian for 20-ish years I can tell you that he is one of the most profound thinkers on todays topic and has deep passion for delivering value to subscribers.
I have really enjoyed reading The Rebooting and would highly recommend it for anyone in our industry. Thanks for providing the content and sparking some great ideas.
What I like about TRB is there's a personal connection bc it's from me. So I hear from people. And I find that more enjoyable and rewarding.
Question: Brian, I love the topic you have chosen and think we should start off by asking you what qualifications you use to determine if a company is truly subscriber focused?
I think being subscriber focused means an organization is first and foremost audience focused. Many publishing businesses, in particular, have to serve multiple masters. Their customers are frequently their advertisers. And they also need to serve the audience – and algorithms. Many times the audience comes in second or even third. I don't think ads are bad, but I think subs as a core of a business means that business starts with the audience.
You see this in their products. So many publishing products are terrible because of their business models. It's not a tech problem.
See...a brutally honest intro set a good tone
I think the healthiest publishing businesses, the ones with truly sustainable models, have alignment. And too many ad-driven businesses are misaligned with their audience. And that's a weird way to operate long term.
Makes a lot of sense!
I love this and we preach the same to our clients. Aligning company goals with customer goals is a sure fire way to achieve mutual success...subscriptions are relationships after all, and the best relationships are based on mutual respect and shared goals. imho.
It would be like running a restaurant where someone other than the diner is paying.
Maybe we'll get to this, but I think an underrated part of subs is it forces the entire organization to be audience focused. Doesn't mean advertisers aren't important – they are – but you see how the NYT does its ads vs, say, Forbes. (No offense, Forbes.)
Question: Very interesting. Do you think it's like that because the audience is already there, it's just different place to sell ads to same people and the customers/advertisers are just in it for the quick hit?
I think
Question: Great, on the heels of that our community wanted to know...What role does research play in being subscriber focused?
I think it's an important tool because you need to understand and have empathy for your audience needs. I'm a fan of the jobs to be done concept. What's the job the audience is relying on you to do? Starting from there is critical.
That said, I find sometimes people rely too much on research vs “walking the shop floor.” It depends on the scale of the business, but talking to the audience, ie the customer, is everything.
Question: There's a lot of talk about the fragility of the media business, the stealing of ad revenue by tech companies, and you've noted the importance of niching-down or specialization for premium content. Do you believe this is an evolution of publishers operating more like product companies rather than audience arbitrage companies?
I think so. It's hard because there are so many different types of publishers. But I don't see people trying to build the next BuzzFeed, not when the current BuzzFeed is valued at far less than its annual revenue. I was in Cannes last week – the newsletter life is rough – and I was struck by conversations being more about quality over quantity. One exec I spoke to was coming up with an ads model for a subscription publication. Zero consideration of using open programmatic. I don't think it's subs vs ads because nearly always the answer is both. But I do think many publishers are seeing that if you have a high-value, differentiated audience that you can have a direct revenue core and layer other services on top that are less adversarial to the audience. I always felt like ad-driven media became a game of seeing how much the audience would endure. Looking at you, Daily Mail.
Newsweek is in a league of its own. It's sorta sad to see these kind of iconic brands become SEO plays.
Unfortunately the list is not short.
I'll add some hope, Time seems to be turning it around.
Question: When you look at how D2C product companies are evolving their approach to marketing, less advertising dependent and more product-led, what lessons do you think exist for publishers and subscription growth enthusiasts like our community?
I think there are similarities in that many D2C companies were renting their customers from platforms in the same way publishers were renting their audiences from those platforms. IDFA, ATT etc has made that strategy not so great. Publishers have been burned so many times over the years by platform dependence that hopefully they've mostly learned that having a direct connection to your audience is usually the way to go, if at all possible.
I did a podcast today with Neil Vogel at Dotdash. I think that's a great example of how a better business model can lead to alignment with the audience.
Love Neil's mantra of best content, faster sites, fewer ads.
Question: Let's focus on some positives for a bit...NYTimes is always held up as the primary example of evolving to a successful subscription-first business, but from your point of view, who else has done really well but hasn't received the recognition?
The Times is unique in so many ways. They have such a unique set of advantages. I think in some ways Politico is underrated for the model they pioneered. It matches their focus on an elite audience. I think that balance of having widespread access to most content and a powerful subs business is the ideal.
But I also think there's a lot to learn from companies like Barstool. I know the content isn't for everyone, etc, but I've never seen a publisher have such a connection with their audience. When we would write about them, we'd get a flood of traffic -- and the people would stay for a very long time. I would joke to Erika, the CEO, that it was because they were sounding out the words. But either way, they've put themselves in the center of a community and have a strong tie with it.
Hadn't thought of that one but I see what you're saying.
Agreed, they know their audience and deliver in a what that nobody else does at scale.
Question: Moving towards application of these concepts...\nIf a company wanted to make meaningful progress in this area what would you recommend as the first few steps that they should take?
Talk to your audience. Really talk to them. Understand the jobs they need done by you. Then establish a direct connection with them. Use that to learn more about them by what they do, which is better than what they say they do. Keep testing hypotheses. I liked to talk about having hypotheses bc too often the person highest in the org chart thinks they know what the answer is when a lot of the tactical implementation is testing out hypotheses.
We love to use the line, "That's an interesting idea....we should test that.”
Alex Bogusky used to say, "the idea is boss." Think he meant that for a creative organization you need to just get focused on the idea, no matter where it came from. I guess the twist here is the results are boss.
...or the customer is boss since they drive the results.
Question: We are out of time but perhaps Brian can spare a few more minutes for some remaining questions? What do you feel are the top 3 ways that brands should look to talk to the audience?
I always hated when people I interviewed would say, "it depends," but it does here.
For instance, Digiday was a niche business, so I would literally talk to the audience at the dozens of events we had every year. Now, even more niche (for now), I simply email with people and ask them to email me. I complement that with things like audience surveys and user behavioral data.
But I find for me I rely a lot more on listening to people I talk to and matching that with my own instinct that I hope is well developed from over the years. I think that's why I gravitate to niche. Because you can do all sorts of things that don't scale, in fact you have to.
Blending good conversation with data collection at scale should give the best of both worlds in many situations....but the context of the conversation is very valuable and missing from a survey.
Question: When we try to better serve the subscriber, what role should personalization play?
I love this topic. I take an expansive view of personalization. I think the way it's been interpreted has been all tech. You crunch data in order to segment people into buckets based on behaviors and you target content they're likely to interact with. It's very antiseptic. (And ad tech took over "personalization" to describe ad targeting. Nobody who doesn't work in advertising refers to targeted ads as “personalized.") I'd prefer if personalization reflect more the actual human, their needs and right to be respected as people. Too often we treat people in ways we know we wouldn't want to be treated. I don't get that. You cannot claim to be audience focused and force people to call between business hours to cancel their subscription and run the save team guantlet.
I think this could have been its only AMA topic itself.
Question: Okay, this has been fantastic and we greatly appreciate your extra time. Only 2 more questions. Besides your own, what other subscriptions do you value highly in your personal\/professional life?
I really like what Puck is doing because it is finding a middle ground by putting individuals at the center of an institutional brand. I think the product is good, and subscriptions enable them to do that. More people I talk to who are building new publishing brands are running some playbook like that. I expect Semafor to look like a mashup of Axios and Puck.
Question: Our next AMA will be with Gary Kibel, a lawyer who specializes in digital media, privacy, and technology law on Tuesday July 26th at 1pm ET. What questions would you like to ask Gary at that AMA?
For Gary, I would want to know whether audience targeting, due to regulations and other restrictions, becomes so much less efficient that publishers end up having far more power (i.e. who wins when the industry moves from "see a cookie, hit a cookie).
Definitely going to add that question to the list!
I found this AMA to be very energizing and inspiring. Thank you so much for your time and your honest insights, Brian. I hope you will continue to be a member of our SubscriptionWorks community and join us for future AMA events. Everyone should check out Brian's newsletter publication, The Rebooting, and sign up for some great content covering subscriptions, publishing, digital marketing, and other relevant topics.